Many of you probably already know about the Raspberry Pi, an inexpensive 35$ computer intended to give kids around the world access to a computer they can use to learn on and make projects. Well, about 6 months ago, I ordered one myself. It took no less than 5 months for me to get one. When I got the first one, I wanted a second for home, so this time I went on eBay and got one in 3 days for double the price.

In any case, the tiny device comes only as a tiny board with all of the connectors needed: HDMI, Ethernet, USB, SD Card, etc. I formatted an SD card with the recommanded operating system and booted it right up. I then proceeded to add support for Meshcentral.com by making sure the mesh agent works on it and that it would be easy to install. The mesh agent compiled for the Pogo Plug / Plug PC worked right away with no changes, but I did improve the installation process.

So why would you use Meshcentral.com with a Raspberry Pi? Well, I can think of two big benefits:

FIrst, on many networks most of the computers are asleep all the time and there was no premanent presence for the mesh agent to run and monitor all the computers. For example, I have a few Intel vPro computers in a lab that are turned off or sleeping, with the Raspberry Pi always on, it automaticaly and periodicaly polls Intel AMT on the sleeping machines and reports back to Meshcentral.com the power state of the sleeping devices.

Second is that if you have your own personal projects, or files on the Raspberry Pi itself, you can access your Pi over the Internet remotely from any browser around the world without worring about punching a hole in a firewall, etc. I can see people controlling holiday light projects over the Internet. Some developers could use the meshcentral.com API's to build web sites that control specific usageson their device.

So there we go, Meshcentral.com with Raspberry Pi support! I am going to have lots of fun with this. Below, the picture of my own Raspberry Pi, I got a transparent case so I could show it off at Intel demo's. I just plugged the power and Ethernet in this picture since I use it to monitor my other machines and don't need the display, mouse, keyboard.